WanttoMeetYourFutureorGender-SwappedSelf?CheckOutFaceApp

Apps like Snapchat and Meitu use face filters to augment or otherwise alter portraits and selfies in various stylized ways, with the effect of making you look like some kind of animal, anime character, or whatnot. These almost always yield amusing results, bound to be shared with your friends and followers on social media. But what if you want your portraits and selfies modified but in such a way that the outcome, to a certain extent, keeps the photorealism intact? That is to say, it’s still a realistic representation of a human face, no bunny ears or supersize emotive eyes in sight. This is what FaceApp sets out to achieve — and largely succeeds at.

Transform your face using artificial intelligence in just one tap

FaceApp is a face transformation app that prides itself on its focus on photorealism. If you’re looking to do all sorts of cartoony stuff on your photos, sorry but FaceApp is not the app for you. But if you want to automatically change your photos in certain ways but want to keep their resulting appearances grounded in reality, then FaceApp should do the trick.

In a nutshell, with FaceApp, you can transform your face or someone’s else to add a smile to it, make it look younger or older, make it more attractive, or make it look like the opposite gender. And it’s thanks to the app’s use of artificial intelligence or machine learning technology that it’s able to carry out convincingly realistic face transformations.

To use FaceApp, you just need to take a new photo or load an existing one from your device’s library and then simply tap one of the available filter options, which are helpfully represented as emojis: Smile 2, Smile (slightly wider and toothier), Hot, Old, Young, Female, Male. After making your selection, FaceApp processes your photo and comes up with the corresponding effect in a jiffy.

FaceApp also features tools that let you easily create GIFs, diptychs, and collages that combine different effects on your photo into one image, allowing you and your friends to see at a glance how the transformations compare with the original and with one another. (During the editing process, you can quickly compare the original and the filter effect by tapping and holding on the photo.)

To be sure, FaceApp is not perfect, as it sometimes results in images that have a sort of uncanny valley feel to them. But for the most part, it’s a neat and easy-to-use app for transforming portraits and selfies in certain photorealistic ways.

Say you have a photo of yourself that you really like, except you wish you had smiled when it was taken. Or another photo where you wish your face didn’t look so haggard or aged. Instead of reshooting your portrait or selfie (which may be impractical given the change in time and setting that has probably taken place since the original capture) or resorting to Photoshop (which may take a while especially if you don’t know it yourself and still have to ask someone else to do it), you can just load the photo onto FaceApp, tap the appropriate option, and voila, your closed mouth is turned into a grin, your physiognomy is prettified, or your countenance is made more youthful. And if you just want to see how you’d like decades from now or on the other end of the gender spectrum, and perhaps share the results with your friends to amuse or wow them, you can do that too in just a tap in FaceApp.

Optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, FaceApp is available on the App Store for free, with a $3.99 in-app purchase for its Pro upgrade, which gets rid of ads, adds the option to remove watermarks, unlocks face selection, and provides priority processing.